Friday, 22 July 2016

A couple of years ago, we were treated to the ironic site of a bunch of climate change Chicken Littles heading off to the Antarctic in a ship. The intent was to demonstrate how much global warming had caused the ice in the south pole to attenuate away to, well, almost nothing. Sadly, the ship became ice-locked. With great embarrassment, the loonies returned to Australia having become the laughing stock of the world. Not a bad achievement.

Now the feat is being matched at the North Pole. Arctic ice we are relentlessly told is shrinking away to nothing due to global warming. So, yet another "research" ship has set sail to see first hand the extent of ice degradation in the Arctic Sea. You guessed it. The ship is ice-bound.

A group of adventurers, sailors, pilots and climate scientists that recently started a journey around the North Pole in an effort to show the lack of ice, has been blocked from further travels by ice. The Polar Ocean Challenge is taking a two month journey that will see them go from Bristol, Alaska, to Norway, then to Russia through the North East passage, back to Alaska through the North West passage, to Greenland and then ultimately back to Bristol. Their objective, as laid out by their website, was to demonstrate “that the Arctic sea ice coverage shrinks back so far now in the summer months that sea that was permanently locked up now can allow passage through.”

There has been one small hiccup thus-far though: they are currently stuck in Murmansk, Russia because there is too much ice blocking the North East passage the team said didn’t exist in summer months, according to Real Climate Science. Real Climate Science also provides a graph showing that current Arctic temperatures — despite alarmist claims of the Arctic being hotter than ever — is actually below normal.

The Polar Ocean Challenge team is not the first global warming expedition to be faced with icy troubles. In 2013, an Antarctic research vessel named Akademik Shokalskiy became trapped in the ice, the problem was so severe that they actually had to rescue the 52 crew members. In 2015 a Canadian ice breaking ship, the CCGS Amundsen, was forced to reroute and help a number of supply ships that had become trapped by ice. [Daily Caller]